


Loving You is In The Feelings

by IncendiaryCatalyst



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, F/M mentioned, OkCryptid, monster girlfriend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-19
Updated: 2018-11-19
Packaged: 2019-08-26 05:06:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16675051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IncendiaryCatalyst/pseuds/IncendiaryCatalyst
Summary: My work for the Okcryptid collab on tumblr! Find me there at exoexo! (I won't be there much though because tumblr's gone off the deep end, hence backing up works.)





	Loving You is In The Feelings

You didn’t even mean to install the app.

You know it sounds weird, but you’d just been updating apps on your phone, and you’d gotten distracted by your roommate (who had put foil in the microwave, bless her heart) and put your phone in your pocket, and like all shitty cheap phones it had mistaken your frantic running to put out a fire in your house for intentional typing. And of course Auto-Correct had actually given enough of an effort to sort out ikdtbyoty, and it had turned it to “Ok cryptid”. It had then downloaded the app and the rest was history.

You still hadn’t opened the app.

It wasn’t that you wouldn’t date a monster if it happened naturally; in fact, you loved monsters. Your parents had died when you were young, and you’d grown up with your godparents, a pair of werewolves. You were familiar with monsters, and how sweet they could be, and how demonized they were by most of the human population since they’d revealed themselves back in the 50′s. You’d probably feel more comfortable dating a monster girl; you wouldn’t have to worry what they’d think of your adoptive parents. It was just…

Your dating life wasn’t exactly _thriving_ , sure, but had it really come to online dating?

“Hey,” yelled Rosaline, your roommate, “do you think that I could microwave Styrofoam?”

“No,” you called back.

“Okay…” She trailed off. “Hey, do you have any idea what I can microwave these grapes on?”

You ran to the kitchen again.

* * *

It wasn’t really Rosaline’s fault. She was a slime monster, and so it wasn’t like she’d been around many microwaves. Her parents claimed they made them feel queasy, so when it hadn’t made her queasy she’d made your microwave her favorite toy. The problem was that she never seemed to get what would catch fire in it, and for every happy tv dinner she made there were a solid twenty minor fires you had to put out. You didn’t mind. She was your best friend. You’d grown up as next door neighbors, gone to colleges on separate sides of the country, and now you were back together in good old Salem, Oregon.

It’s hilarious to you how a city named Salem had become a hub for monsters around the world, but maybe it was a perk of the name. Like, if people were already in a supernatural mood when they heard of Salem, maybe it helped earlier monster settlers integrating into the human world. Vampires and werewolves, of course, had been among humans for millennia, and some others probably had been in small amounts, but the rest had mostly had to adapt over the past seventy years. You know it couldn’t have been easy, especially if your colleague’s parents were any indicator.

You worked for the Salem Museum of Exopological Studies as a curator, a position you’d been lucky to get since there were only two humans on the entire payroll. The other was a blind oracle named Lucy, and her roommate was one of the translators for Greek historical documents and records from the Levant. You’ve never met the girl, but you’d heard she was sweet, if overly studious and avoidant. You know she’s one of the museum’s top assets, and you also know that by Lucy’s own admission her roommate was a huge part of how she got the job. You were hired because of your closeness to the the monster community in Olympia through your adoptive parents and Rosaline.

Rosaline, on the other hand, was fully embracing the wonders of the modern world and working as a bartender at a monster club downtown. In fact, she was leaving for work soon, and you knew she wouldn’t be back till a little past midnight, right about when you needed to get to sleep. Still, she couldn’t drive because of her gelatinous body. (”Its one curse,” she loudly complained to anyone who would listen. “Eternal beauty, absolutely the best sex you’ll ever have, but I can’t drive. The cruelty of the modern world!”) You decided to check and see if you should pick her up.

“Oh, did I not tell you?” she asked. “I’m going out with Robby tonight after my shift.”

You can’t remember who Robby is, and your face must have shown it because Rosaline gave you an exasperated sigh and continued.

“Robby? The Minotaur from last week? He’s taking me out after work tonight and I wouldn’t expect me home until…” She looked at her phone. “When’s my next shift?”

“Tuesday at five.”

“Right, I wouldn’t expect me home until Tuesday at four thirty, if you catch my drift.”

And you do. You wish you didn’t but you unfortunately really do.

You have to wonder, after she leaves, how it is that Rosaline has all the dating luck in your apartment. Robby’s the sixth guy this month for her, and it wasn’t even the twentieth yet! You know your looks are fairly average, especially since everyone who your parents set you up with expect you to have those ungodly good looking wolf genes glamorizing you. And sure, being a lesbian limits your dating pool, but you’d expect to have a little more luck. No, you don’t go out very often, and yes, you do work as a history nerd for a living (in a very enviable position, you might add), and–

Yeah, you can kindof see why you haven’t had a date since college.

But still, it would just feel _wrong_ to date someone online. Right?

You don’t open the app right away. Not that you weren’t being persuaded, but it was early in the day. You pull up Netflix and you watch a documentary about Suvahu Rama, a naga who had been instrumental in proving parthenogenesis to be possible in nagas as a species. You’d been meaning to watch it for months, because while it wasn’t directly relevant to your work you’d gone into exopology because of your love for non-human people and their history, and damn if this wasn’t history in the making.

You took your time fixing dinner, and you knew it was just wasting time, trying to think of a good reason _not_ to use the app. You wanted to think that you’d meet a girl like your birth parents had, in a moment of absolute clarity and spend the rest of your life with her. You’d even be happy if there was someone you weren’t thinking of from your childhood, like with your adoptive parents, but you just didn’t know that many girls growing up, and besides Rosaline they weren’t exactly nice to your parents, so you wouldn’t date them anyways. And Rosaline was basically a sister to you. Even if she was into girls, the two of you would never work.

You finish dinner and decide that maybe you have to swallow your pride a little and try something new.

You open the app with bated breath.

When it opens the app doesn’t move past the home screen for a full three minutes, and you’re about to exit out when the screen goes white and a small “Welcome” is displayed in the center of your screen.

You may not have planned on downloading the app, but you knew about it. Lucy was the acquisitions director at the museum, so you worked quite closely with her, and one day a few weeks ago you had seen her tapping away at it. You’d asked and she’d just laughed.

“It’s just the damn introductory quiz.”

“Introductory quiz?”

“For OkCryptid. I’ve been working on it since last night and I still haven’t finished!”

She hadn’t been done when you’d gone home for the day either. But a week later, when she’d finally finished the agonizingly long questionnaire, she’d been paired up with a geist girl almost immediately, and they’d been together for several months now.

You didn’t know how the app did it, but all the stories sounded similar. Excruciatingly long quiz, immediate match, long lasting happy relationship.

You sighed. You weren’t sure how much you trusted in this kind of stuff, but the worst that could happen is you spending your free time for the week on a fool’s errand, which yes, kindof would suck, but isn’t the end of the world.

You enter your name and age, and you mark that you’re a woman looking for women. You tell the app that you’re a human and it’s off to the races.

**_Why aren’t you dating right now?_ **

And, oof, they hit you with a tough one right off the bat. You answer honestly.

_I work a lot, and I work as an exopologist, which isn’t the most interesting work to most people, and I’m a lesbian so there’s even less of a dating population for me._

You decide to leave out your plain appearance, since the app takes a picture of you at the end, according to Lucy.

**_What is your greatest fear?_ **

And you have to really think for a bit about that one, because what _is_ your greatest fear? You’re not scared very often, and you wouldn’t consider yourself a scared person really either. But you want to answer the question, because you’re tired of being alone and frankly you’re sick of Rosaline being the only one who gets any in your house.

_Being everyone’s last choice._

You wait a moment before another question pops up.

_**Would you be willing to have sex in the dark exclusively?** _

And you’re completely taken aback, because you know from Lucy that sex didn’t even factor into the questions until the last day she was working on her questionnaire, and you personally saw her answer a lot more questions than these, so it couldn’t have even been you being less thorough in answering than you should be.

Still, you answer.

_It’s not ideal, but if it made my partner comfortable, sure._

This time you wait longer, and you wonder again whether the app has crashed. You almost hope it has. After all, you remind yourself, even if you do this, it’ll just feel _wrong_. Forced. Unnatural. It makes you think about the short pauses between questions and really, you have to ask yourself how this app even works, but before you can think too much about it you’re pulled from your thoughts by a jingling melody coming from your phone. When you look down you see two lone words on the screen.

_**Match Found** _

* * *

You went to bed shortly after. The screen had refused to move past the notification, and when you called Lucy to ask for help she’d told you that the app just did that until it decided to put the matched couple in contact with each other.

You didn’t know what that meant but thanked her and went online to see what the hell she was talking about.

Apparently, unlike what you had been lead to believe, OkCryptid uses a unique method of putting its users in contact: it instructs them both to move into various locations to lead them together. You can hardly believe it; it seems completely inefficient and not very convenient, not to mention it could be derailed by either or both people ignoring the app.

So yes, you went to bed shortly after. You were stressed, and more than a little angry, and jealous of what you knew Rosaline was doing right then, even if you weren’t particularly jealous of who she was doing it with.

But maybe you were right to be worried before you opened the app. Maybe it really _would_ just feel wrong. Maybe you would just never have what people like Rosaline had. Yes, you though, sleep is better than feeling that _wrong_.

Besides, you had work the next day.

* * *

The next day at work, about an hour before you’d planned to take lunch your phone, which is always set to silence while you’re at the museum, starts playing the melody from the night before. You hate yourself for immediately reaching for it, a move you’d call desperate, but you reason that no one else is around and even if they were, your phone _was_ making an awful racket.

**_Subbasement 2, Archival Room 32-A_ **

You stare at the phone for a minute and then it goes completely dark. You try to start it up again, even going so far as to remove the battery and attempt rebooting, but nothing takes.

“Great,” you mumble to yourself as you make your way to the staff elevator. “Because I really needed to buy a new phone right now.”

Regardless, you make your way down the halls of subbasement two, glad to be familiar with the building already because the hall gets darker as you get closer to your destination. By the time you reach archive room 32-A you’re identifying doors by their braille. You open the door and are greeted with complete darkness.

“Hello?” you call out, stepping cautiously into the room.

There’s no response, but as you step further into the room you can hear a soft hissing noise from the back right side of the room.

“I can hear that someone’s in here,” you cry out, and you could swear you heard someone cursing. Then there’s a bunch of fumbling, before finally–

“No one is supposed to be down here.”

You scoff. “First of all, I’m a curator, so I have clearance to be anywhere I choose, and–”

The voice cuts you off again. “No, I mean– it’s a safety thing, you shouldn’t be down here without warning me.”

You can tell that it’s definitely a woman, one with a deeper voice and a rasping lisp. Still, she sounds anxious, and she sounds kind, and you hate that you’ve upset her to that point so you back off.

“Anyways,” you mumble, “this is going to sound really stupid, but my phone told me to come down here.”

You hear some tapping on her own phone, but you can’t see the light from its screen anywhere. And then you hear a gasped “Oh,” and you think you understand.

“Are you, uh…” you say, rubbing the back of your neck.

“Yeah. Hi.”

She’s moving around, you can hear, but you don’t know exactly what she’s doing until the light flips on.

The first thing you notice is that, unlike everyone else who works here, she’s wearing jeans and a flannel. The second thing you notice is the giant veil completely covering her head. Besides that, she looks entirely normal, although as you know, that hardly means anything.

“Hi, I’m Chelsea,” you tell her. “I’m, uh, I’m one of the curators.”

She giggles. “So you said. I’m Kalypso.”

You smile, and move towards her, but her hand goes up, and you hear hissing, and she says, panicked, “Wait wait wait!”

You stop, and she sighs.

“Sorry,” she says. “I don’t like to get near people a lot.”

You frown, but she continues.

“It’s not that I don’t like being near them, it’s that it’s hard to explain. It’s why I work alone. You know I’m not human, but it’s hard to explain what I am. I’m- well, the Gorgons were a family, not our species, but I’m what a lot of people call Gorgons. Technically I don’t even have any relation to Medusa, and even our own exopologists don’t have any real leads on where we come from, but most people still don’t know we exist. We’re too dangerous. All it takes is one accidental gaze to turn someone we love to stone forever. So I work down here, and I go home and my roommate can’t see me anyways, so–”

Realization hits you. “Oh my god, you’re Lucy’s roommate!”

You can see her nodding under her veil. “Exactly. I’m not sure why I went through with that stupid app, but I just… I’ve seen what Lucy’s been like since she met Sarah, and I _wanted_ that. Maybe that’s selfish, but I just. I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Do you hate me?”

You rush over to her, careful not to touch her and startle her. “Kalypso, no! Of course not. You deserve love just as much as everyone else.”

You can hear tears in her voice when she asks, “Are you sure?” and you know that the app didn’t make a mistake, because you would do anything to make the woman in front of you happy.

You move closer, your bodies almost touching, your smile wide. Your words are breathy and you can hear your heart beating quickly in your ears. “I’d very much like to kiss you.”

She stutters out an answer. “Th-th-that’s not s-s-s-s-s-safe though!”

“Do you want me to kiss you?”

She nods her head vigorously while holding her veil in place, trusting neither her words nor body not to mess this up, and you reach for the light switch next to her and turn it off.

You lift her veil, and you caress her cheek. It’s just barely scaly, and you can feel her hair snakes seeking you out, longing for a touch they’ve likely never had. You lean in, and you kiss her, and you think to yourself, yes. This feels _right_.


End file.
